L.A. Schools Get $15-Million Science Grant : Education: Program also includes math. It stresses a hands-on approach rather than lectures and drills. One goal is to close a performance gap among students from disparate backgrounds.

First-grade teacher and science guru Suzanne Patterson-Jones was a latecomer to the specialty that is changing her professional life. “I flunked college biology,” she said. “I thought I was bad in science.”

But Patterson-Jones’ self-assessment changed several years ago after Ambler Magnet School in Carson, where she teaches, received a grant to improve its science offerings. Ever since, she has introduced lessons on botany, biology and other sciences at every turn--even while reading literary classics to her charges--and has spent many hours after work sharing her newfound enthusiasm with other teachers.

Starting today, she’ll be working with other teachers full-time as one of 13 exemplary Los Angeles instructors at the forefront of a $15-million, federally funded effort to remake science and math instruction in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest.

The grant, to be distributed over the next five years, is part of $105 million awarded Monday by the National Science Foundation to seven urban school systems that serve a high percentage of minority students.

Other districts receiving the awards are Memphis, Cleveland, Columbus, Fresno, New Orleans and Philadelphia.

One goal of the program is to “confront one of the most intractable education issues of our time--the disturbing and continuing performance gap between the mostly poor and predominantly minority children of the inner cities and their largely white suburban counterparts,” said Luther Williams, the NSF’s assistant director for education and human resources.

The focus in Los Angeles will be on training teachers at more than 600 schools in a new curriculum for kindergarten through 12th grade that stresses problem-solving and hands-on learning rather than lectures and repetitive drills.

The ambitious list of what the district hopes to accomplish includes raising test scores, encouraging students to take more high-level math and science courses, increasing graduation rates and enabling more students to enroll in college.

Even though the money is but a fraction of what will be needed to finance that agenda, district officials were nonetheless excited by Monday’s announcement and said they are determined to put the new resources to good use.

“For too long we have let kids do it the easy way . . . by taking courses such as consumer math and earth science,” said district Supt. Sid Thompson, a former math teacher who was in Washington with several other district representatives for the announcement of the grant. “I call it pablum, baby food. . . . It doesn’t give (students) a real perspective, real preparation for leaving high school and . . . that has to change.”

The district applied for the grant a year ago, but its proposal was vague and unfocused, with few details and no specific goals, and was rejected by the NSF. This time, Thompson put Deputy Supt. Amy McKenna in charge and hired a team of outside grant writers to develop the proposal.

The new application is a highly specific, 20-page blueprint for dramatic change that starts with showcasing proven approaches at seminars this spring and continues with in-depth training for 120 teachers this summer.

Those teachers will help the faculties at 100 schools begin next fall to implement a curriculum that introduces concepts of biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry and other subjects in the earliest grades. Eventually, Thompson hopes, the grant will help pay for all the district’s teachers to attend a summer session of several weeks. Individual schools will have to use other resources to pay for follow-up training and to buy science kits and other equipment essential for the success of hands-on, real-world math and science--everything from microscopes and test tubes to calculators and computers.

The district’s proposal calls for recruiting and training more bilingual math and science teachers--including some that are now instructional aides--transforming five elementary-level science centers into math and science centers that serve all grades, and creating showcases of communications technology to assist teachers, parents and students.

The most important of the reforms involve strengthening the district’s commitment to a curriculum that meets state and national guidelines for what and how students should be taught.

“The key to all of this is powerful, strong, engaging elementary programs so that students who go to middle schools . . . have an overwhelming desire to take science,” said Chris Holle, a science teacher who helped write the NSF grant and will be involved in identifying promising innovations already in place in the district and in developing the training programs.

In middle schools, he said, teachers should use such real-world problems as acid rain, oil spills and “what’s wrong with the Los Angeles River” to sustain that interest while preparing students for high school classes that also must be redesigned. The same is true in math, Holle said.

Patterson-Jones, the first-grade teacher, came to the attention of those planning the new initiative because she was already incorporating science into her daily lesson plans and helping her fellow teachers do the same.

When she taught the children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web,” for example, she made it a starting point for lessons about animal communities, the life cycles of plants, soil erosion and weather.

“They enjoy it,” said Patterson-Jones of her students. “They don’t realize it’s science. It’s not under a separate category when you integrate it this way. They’re learning about life and how it works.”